The referendum vote… November 10, 2012

It hardly has to be said that whatever one thinks of a particular referendum it is essential to participate. Far too few vote and I wonder what the turnout today will be in light of the various controversies swirling around the measure.

When voting on North Strand this morning the turn out was – according to the people there – fairly light. And the latest reports put it at ‘very low’ overall. That said a steady trickle of people in and out.

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Anyone know if they can kick you off the register? My name wasn’t on the register in the school on seville place, where I usually vote.

Tbh a low turnout wouldn’t be great for the yes side. People expect this to pass with a large majority and I don’t think many of the yes side would be pushed. The single no voter I know, is determined on voting. Also I hope people don’t vote no just to register a protest with the government.

Didn’t get polling cards, for the first time ever. Voted using my drivers licence as ID, at around 9:30am, and it looked like I was more or less the first to do so, no names crossed off the list as the official flicked through the list to find my name on the register.

There has been quite a vocal anti-government vibe alright in a lot of the FB chatter I’ve seen. Pity the anti-government sentiment didn’t manifest in the Fiscal Treaty referendum. It would be a terrible shame if children’s rights were exploited by the regressive minority to sway people against a YES vote.

I went up to vote at 2pm and the registrar manning the desk told me that out of the 500 people (approx) registered in the area, only 47 (me and the wife included) had so far come in to vote. Seeing as there probably won’t be a big after-work rush because it’s a Saturday, that points to a pretty low turnout in my neck of the woods (rural north Wexford).

Be lucky if the turnout reaches 22%. Love the fact that the Gov knew there’d be a low turnout and so decided to use this as a test for Saturday voting in elections. Guess the student vote won’t count in future, to the detriment of smaller parties and independents.

Voted yes out of a vague sense that chilren’s rights have to be a good thing, although as I said to her nibs as we were leaving the polling station, of all the referenda that’ve come up over the couple of decades, this is the one that there’s been least debate about and I feel least clear about what I actually voted on.

Herself voted no, partly as a protest about the whole mismanagement of the information process / Shatter’s arrogance over the last couple of days, but also partly because, as a teacher, she felt there were countless better ways to spend a couple of millions of government money improving childrens’ lives than on a referendum.

While in no way a statistically significant sample, that does seem to reflect, in microcosm, the whole “debate” (or lack of) around this vote.

“Herself voted no, partly as a protest about the whole mismanagement of the information process / Shatter’s arrogance over the last couple of days, but also partly because, as a teacher, she felt there were countless better ways to spend a couple of millions of government money improving childrens’ lives than on a referendum.”

A very sad approach, I think.

I worked, 17 years ago, with a young woman K who had, like many others in their early 20s, moved out to her own flat, and making her way in her chosen profession. In her case, though, she had moved out from the home of a long-term foster family she and her brother had been with since she was 6 and he was 4. They had been in care because their mother was a drinking alcoholic who was unable and unwilling to look after them. I wondered why it had remained a foster relationship for so long, and she told me. Today’s referendun may have come too late for K and her brother, but it came. Given that the people, not the Oireachtas, makes the final say on changing the constitution, there was no other way to guarantee the current and futures generations of Ks a proper family than to spend that money. The failure of our government to spend more money on the other pressing needs is appalling, but it is wrong to set up K against the others — that was not the choice we had today.

I think there was a number of failures (a) on the government side to really deal with the scaremongering – there needed to someone reasonable a la France Fitzgerald/ Fergus Finlay but also someone more in the face of the No campaign. The No campaign was the campaign for the status quo and for what we’ve failed to do up to now, instead we let them be the campaign of what awful things might happen in the future. (b) we should have ensured that there was no possibility at all that the taxpayer funded information was in any way biased. Someone has to pay the price for that cock-up (c) a large segment of the public isn’t interested at all in holding up their end of being a citizen, informing themselves to any degree, reading a paper, going to the library. (d) there was a dual problem in that the state/institutional Ireland has a long and poor history of taking kids away from their parents and then actively neglecting them, that may have changed too much in the 70s and onwards when the law was observed more but then children were left in appalling situations. In effect people don’t, with some good cause, trust the state or its agents to necessary to right in such situations (e) misinformation where people thought cases such as that in Cleveland (UK) could now happen here.